Thanks Educate .....
Even though I haven't received the physical product yet - I thoroughly researched it and viewed countless YouTube vids. Seems all very straight-forward.
But in the 'real-world' things don't always work out perfectly.
Since you have used several of these and have mentioned a negative here, would you please share a few pointers on how things could go 'terribly wrong' even under the best of conditions and intentions?!
Sure, here are things that go wrong:
1) You forget the 20 word private seed or write it down incorrectly.
2) Someone else comes across your 24 word seed (if you saved it online or on computer) or just steals it from you and your funds are lost.
3) Someone kidnaps you and puts a gun to your head forcing you to give up your PIN for device or 20 word seed.
4) You send crypto incorrectly. For example, you send Bitcoin Cash to Bitcoin address and thus lose it. It is easy to mix them up.
5) The paper where you stored this seed is lost (house burns down), I suggest storing it on a metal plate somewhere (read on cryptosteel), but have the words shortened so only you and nobody alone can understand them.
6) You die and your funds die with you if you haven't told your family how to recover them.
Why I like Trezor even better than Ledger:
- Trezor offers an additional safety measure - a password. So each password opens a different set of addresses. Let us say someone kidnaps you and demands your bitcoins. Tell them to open Trezor and enter no password or enter "abc" (example) password. They do this and see your funds, but there is NO WAY for them knowing that under password "bcda" you have stored your millions. So it is sort of like a plausible deniability. For Ledger, as long as they have the pin or 24 word mnemonic seed, they will get your funds. Here is another risk though - you forget your passphrase yourself.
Hope it helps.
Oh and one more thing. If you manage to lose your Bitcoin by sending to wrong address or locking yourself out of device forever, please write on public forums or reddit like /r/bitcoin how much you locked yourself out of and how much is lost. This way people can keep track of coins lost and assume theirs are worth more now due to scarcity.